Free-wheeling flakiness

Early on in his introduction of nearly 60 pages, Owen Hatherley writes: ‘I find the Britain promised by Brexiters quite terrifying — xenophobic, paranoid, enclosed, pitifully nostalgic, cruel. But in much of the country that landscape never went away.’

One’s heart sinks. This isn’t even polemical; it’s just silly. The introduction, subtitled ‘What is a European city?’, continues to push the line until something like a position is reached: Britain is awful, Europe is wonderful. I was reminded of certain of my French, Italian and German friends who are excited by the new horizons of living anywhere but in their own homelands, which they find every bit as stultifying as Hatherley does his.

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As the introduction proceeds, the author’s block-like prejudices (of the usual hard left set) pile up. So does a kind of free-wheeling flakiness; and sometimes error. ‘Europe, geographically, is a fiction.’ Really? He refers to ‘Neoclassicism, in which the “purer” architecture of the ancient Greeks became the new model.’ The inspiration for Neoclassicism was ancient Rome; the Greek revival came later. British cities are portrayed as unplanned, capitalist hells; but unplanned, mafioso Naples has to be ‘thrilling’. He calls the Louvre ‘Baroque’, whereas that vast building has everything except the Baroque (Bernini’s wavy proposal was rejected in favour of an early, stunning example of Neoclassicism by Perrault).

Indeed, when it comes to Paris, the flickers start to appear in Hatherley’s guiding, Europhiliac light, and he goes blind: Paris is ‘all these white boulevards, full of white people’. Berlin, he announces, has ‘spatial thrills Paris can’t rival’. But these cities are utterly distinct, not architectural rivals. In fact much of rebuilt, unified Berlin is so hard and blank that they are having to pastiche parts of the royal centre to anchor it in time.